Investing in the Future, One Roasted Bean at a Time

We got our annual reports this week from all of our various investments. We'd have done better to bury the money in a coffee tin in the back yard.

Now, a lot of people are in this situation this year, what with the collapse of the "let the financial sector regulate itself - what could go wrong?" era and all. But this is nothing new for us. With the exception of a handful of shares of Marvel Comics that Kim bought on a whim, all of our investments have had a negative return for as long as we've owned them.

We have the Reverse Midas Touch when it comes to money.

Now, I don't claim to understand money all that well. My financial plan through the course of my life has had exactly two steps. First, find out how much money I have. Second, try to spend less than that.

Hey, it's worked so far.

When Tabitha and Lauren were born, we (read: Kim) decided that we needed a financial advisor. I thought you had to have finances in order to have a financial advisor, but apparently such is not the case. Our friend Luke was in that business, and he said he would donate his time to help us out.

And God knows he tried.

It didn't take long to establish that the most constructive thing I could be doing when he came over to discuss our finances was to watch the children and sign whatever was placed in front of me. So I let him and Kim sort all that stuff out. They weighed, they compared, they did all of the things that one is supposed to do in situations like this one. And as noted above, our track record at choosing investments was still rather sub-prime.

Little financial joke there. Just a little one. Tiny one. Right, well.

Oh, eventually these things will turn around and make money, and at the moment we're investing for the long haul rather than immediate returns - retirement, college funds, that sort of thing. It's not a worrisome thing just yet. And at least I'm not picking our investments, which would probably make them behave even more poorly. Money can sense fear that way, as well as disinterest, confusion, and delusion. It's like wolverines that way, only you'd really like to have more money around the house but probably not more wolverines, so the analogy is somewhat imperfect. Still, we keep investing.

But if this keeps up, we'll be buying coffee tins and shovels.

And a metal detector. Our memories are not as good as they once were.